Overview

The Tray Icon Info application lets you enumerate your system tray icons and rearrange their positions, so that you can have your more frequently used icons positioned to the left most side (or right most depending on your personal preference). I wrote this as I got used to having the MSN Messenger icon on the left most side of the tray and found it annoying and inconvenient when newly added icons pushed it to the right. I had to exit and restart MSN Messenger to reposition it where I wanted. This application simplifies things for me.

Supported OS

This application only works on Windows XP. It may run on Windows 2003 too, but since I wasn't sure and since I didn't have the option to test it out, I have a version check and the program exits if it's a non-XP OS. If anyone's interested, they can comment out the version check and run it in on 2003 - but I have no idea as to whether it'll work or not.

Notes

For some tray icons, I am unable to retrieve the icon, so I show a red octagon with a white question mark.

Using the toolbar or the menu, you can send a left click, right click or a double click message to the tray icon.

You can use the << and >> icons to move the icons around the tray.

Copy (Ctrl-C) will copy some textual info to the clipboard (includes both the tool-tip text as well as the owner process path).

Double clicking an entry in the list view is equivalent to sending a double-click message.

The tray has hidden icons - mostly put there by Explorer. These icons won't have tool-tips.

And er, if you are wondering why the toolbar icons look so ghastly, guess who designed them!

Technical notes

The trick used here is to enumerate the buttons of the ToolbarWindow32 window that represents the system tray. The following code is used to locate this window (routine FindWindow/FindWindowEx stuff) :-

The number won't match the number of visible icons because of some hidden icons inserted by Explorer + the Hide Inactive Icons setting may be enabled.

BTW to retrieve toolbar info for each button, I use my CProcessData class. [CProcessData is a template class that makes it easy to use data allocated in a different process, and is useful when making inter-process SendMessage/PostMessage calls]

The dwData member of each TBBUTTON structure of the toolbar points to an undocumented structure. The first few bytes of the structure are as follows (on XP anyway) :-

There's more info, but I am not sure what the rest of it means. Reserved[0] has something to do with the visibility state of an icon when the Hide Inactive Icons setting is enabled, but it's behavior was too sporadic for me to give it a proper meaning and since I didn't really want that info, I didn't bother too much. All my Google searches on this undocumented structure resulted in nothing. It's times like this when you wish Windows provided full source code

Anyway here's the code I use to retrieve the rest of the information I require.

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About the Author

Nish is a real nice guy who has been writing code since 1990 when he first got his hands on an 8088 with 640 KB RAM. Originally from sunny Trivandrum in India, he has been living in various places over the past few years and often thinks it’s time he settled down somewhere.

Nish has been a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP since October, 2002 - awfully nice of Microsoft, he thinks. He maintains an MVP tips and tricks web site - www.voidnish.com where you can find a consolidated list of his articles, writings and ideas on VC++, MFC, .NET and C++/CLI. Oh, and you might want to check out his blog on C++/CLI, MFC, .NET and a lot of other stuff - blog.voidnish.com.